Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [47]
General Zia declared Pakistan to be an Islamic state. He reversed Ayub’s measures limiting the role of Islam in the state, and greatly extended the formal Islamizing measures which Bhutto had adopted in a (vain) attempt to appeal to the Islamist parties. However, Zia conceived his Islamization programme as top-down, and almost entirely in terms of strengthening state power through an increase in the disciplinary aspects of Shariah law. Meanwhile, throughout the state services and society in general, honesty, morality and duty were to be strengthened through the preaching of religion. Islamic ideas of the promotion of social justice and social welfare, and of encouraging people to organize themselves to seek these goals – key to the success of Islamist politics elsewhere in the Muslim world – were almost entirely absent; inevitably so given the essentially authoritarian cast of Zia’s mind and strategy.
Zia’s approach therefore left the Islamist parties deeply unsatisfied. The Jamaat Islami in particular has also always had a certain real though complex belief in democracy, and became increasingly disillusioned with Zia’s dictatorship. On the other hand, for Zia to have formed an alliance with the Islamist parties successfully to transform Pakistani society would also have required them to have been far stronger and more deeply rooted across that society. This in turn would have required much larger, more developed and more confident middle classes in Pakistan.
As subsequent chapters will explore, the great variety of different kinds of Islam in Pakistan makes the creation of a real national Islamist movement extremely difficult. As they will also describe, Zia’s official Islamization wholly failed to overcome these differences, and in fact made them much worse. There were bitter disagreements even among Sunni clerics belonging to different theological schools as to which version of Islamic law should be adopted, and Shias rose in protest against what they saw as an attempt to turn Pakistan into a Sunni state. Coupled with fears created by the Shia Islamic revolution in Iran, this left another malignant legacy of Zia’s rule: enduring violence between Sunni and Shia militant groups.
So rather than the creation of a new state, Zia was left with the same strategy that all the rulers of Pakistan have sooner or later adopted: a combination of reliance on the state bureaucracy, army and police with handing out state patronage to the rural and urban elites in order to win their support. The economy recovered to a great extent from the disasters of Bhutto’s rule, but the boom of the 1980s under Zia proved as shallow as that under Musharraf – based above all on US aid and remittances from the Pakistani workers who flooded to the Gulf states in response to the oil boom. This was in contrast to Ayub, whose administration did build up Pakistan’s real economy, though at a high social cost.
Zia did, however, leave certain legacies. Within Pakistan, he created a new and enduring party, to which was given the glorious name of the old Muslim League (though apart from Pakistani nationalism there was no continuity). Initially just another patronage-based alliance of landowners and urban bosses created by the military for its own purposes, this party subsequently developed a real identity of its own, and has been central to Pakistani politics ever since. Like Bhutto, who developed his power base as a member of Ayub Khan’s administration before breaking with his mentor, so the man charged by Zia with leading the new Muslim League, Nawaz Sharif, later broke with the military that had created him.
Created to counter the Bhuttos’ PPP, the growth of the Muslim